1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to technology for designing and verifying an integrated circuit (“IC”) design.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the rapid growth of the wireless and portable electronic markets, there is a constant demand for new technological advancements. This has resulted in more and more functionality being incorporated into battery-operated products, increasing challenges for power management of such devices.
Such challenges include minimization of leakage power dissipation, designing efficient packaging and cooling systems for power-hungry IC's, or verification of functionality or power shut-off sequences early in the design. These challenges are expected to become even more difficult with the continuous shrinking of process nodes using today's CMOS technology. Managing design and verification for power will be as critical, if not more than, for timing and area in today's IC design flow for portable consumer electronics.
Modern electronic design is typically performed with computer aided design (CAD) tools or electronic design automation (EDA) systems. To design an integrated circuit, a designer first creates high level behavior descriptions of the IC device using a high-level hardware design language (HDL). Common examples of HDLs include Verilog and VHDL. An EDA system typically receives the high level behavior descriptions of the IC device and translates this high-level design language into netlists of various levels of abstraction. Essentially, the process to implement an electronic device begins with functional design and verification (e.g., using RTL), and then proceeds to physical design and verification. Conventional power optimization and implementation techniques are only leveraged at the physical implementation phase of the design. Certain advanced power management techniques like multiple power domains with power shut-off (PSO) methodology can only be implemented at the physical level (i.e., post synthesis). These advanced power management design techniques significantly change the design intent, yet none of the intended behavior can be captured in the RTL. This creates a large gap in the RTL to GDSII implementation and verification flow where the original RTL is no longer reliable and cannot be used to verify the final netlist implementation containing the advanced power management techniques.
In addition, these specialized power management techniques at the physical implementation stage cannot be used by EDA tools at other stages of the design process, and therefore cannot be used by EDA tools at an earlier RTL or gate level stage of the IC design process to perform, for example, functional verification. One reason this is important is because verification of low power designs only at the physical implementation stage of the design process may not capture all potential design flaws within the IC, particularly sequence-related problems for power modes that are ideally tested at the functional stage of the IC design process.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved approach for designing electronic circuits with specialized power requirements, such as low power designs.